Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.
Omar Bradley(?)
Colonel Brighton: I want a decision, sir.
Prince Feisal: You want me to fall back on the Yenbo.
Brighton: Well, you’re not doing much good here, sir. I’m sorry to rub it in, sir, but we can’t supply you here.
Feisal: You could supply us through Aqaba.
General Petraeus’ logistic staff seems to have learned from Lawrence of Arabia.
With the British troops retreating to their air-base near Basra and eventually leaving, the U.S. supply route from Kuwait harbour to Baghdad is endangered. It is assumed that any U.S. conflict with Iran would lead to unrest in the southern Shia provinces in Iraq and disrupt that logistic ‘line of communication’.
But the U.S. military doesn’t seem very concerned. As the NYT wrote two weeks ago:
There is little talk of increasing the American troop presence along the major supply route, which links Baghdad and Kuwait and is called M.S.R. Tampa, although officials in Baghdad and Washington say other options include increased patrols by armed surveillance aircraft, attack helicopters and combat jets.
There are about 2,000 trucks per day hauling supplies on the red road, including some 3.3 million gallons of fuel per day. It is quite optimistic to believe that a 300 miles long road with many
big bridges and lots of heavy traffic could be kept open by ‘armed
surveillance aircrafts’. So this didn’t sound right to me.
Now we learn that the military built and uses an alternative. It only didn’t talk about it.
McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel travels by car from Baghdad to Amman. She finds the road through Anbar province open and full of trucks:
The biggest obstacles were huge convoys of cargo trucks, escorted by American Humvees, ..
…
The highway then stretched for miles of dusty desert. Sometimes we veered onto access roads to avoid huge convoys of trucks, often with American military escorts. In one I counted 202 vehicles.
…
Later, I got an e-mail from Mohammed about his return trip to Baghdad."We drove all the way back at night and there were hundreds of trucks and many passenger vehicles on the road," he wrote.
While the route through Anbar was closed during the U.S. fights with the Sunni resistance, now huge U.S. convois use it day and night without much trouble.
The ‘Anbar awakening’ created an alternative to MSR Tampa. The tenth of millions of dollars the U.S. payed to those pesky Sunni sheiks are a good investment. They bought a new secure supply line. These Sunni sheiks will also not complain very much when some day bombs might fall on Shia Iran …
One might even suspect that opening an alternative to MSR Tampa was the real intent of the money induced ‘awakening’. But we likely will never know …
While the new Route Blue is about double as long as the red MSR Tampa, a long haul from the port of Aqaba is better than no haul at all. Especially when it carries your breakfast.
(Note to those nuts who will damn McClatchy for ‘again revealing military secrets’. Folks in the Middle East know perfectly well how to count the trucks passing their windows. They don’t need ‘western’ news services to evaluate its meaning.)